Modern Vespa

tried uploading an image as heic and got this.

I've been having some trouble with HEIC (and also webp) due to a Linux update overwriting my custom-built version of ImageMagick. Thought I had fixed it, but obviously something still wrong.

On a side note, WTF are you doing with an HEIC image? Have you come around and are now renouncing your iPhone heresy?

Oh, and I won't have access to my development environment for the next month, so an HEIC fix might have to wait, unless I can fix it over ssh.

my original was a 12mb jpeg which MV can't handle. so I tried converting to an heic.

PS, I do wish google would give me an heic option in the pixel camera app. heic is supported natively in android, guess google doesn't want to deal with confused users or some such.

How big was the HEIC?

I was tinkering with the upload size restrictions recently — the ultimate limit is actually controlled by PHP, and I think (but can't remember for sure) that I set it for 16mb

5.2MB

Would it be possible to have a 'read offline' mode? Obviously posting or reading updated comments would not be possible. I guess I would need to download some part of MV to my device, correct?

This would be a really nice feature for when I'm on an airplane, especially when the intertubes is down, which is often.

It's technically feasible, but definitely not easy. I think the biggest question would be about what app would be used to actually view the offline content? Writing an iOS app and an iPadOS app and seventeen flavors of Android app is probably out of the question, so I would need to look for some kind of existing app or entity that could both hold the offline content and present it to the user.

RSS readers sort of fit the bill, except that (a) RSS is a dying standard, and (b) RSS is very much geared toward blog content, with a single article standing on its own, and always with reverse chronology (newest content at the top). I'm not sure how the concept of forum areas, topic indexes, and topics made up of multiple posts fits into that model.

The next question would be how to choose the content? If it were strictly a date cutoff (say, everything from the forum for the last 7 days) then you'd have a lot of NSM and MP3 content in there as well — fine for some, but unnecessary bulk for others. So would I create a mechanism to choose which forum areas go into the download?

What about links between topics? Do those work, assuming that the linking topic and the linked topic are both within the time frame of the downloaded content?

And how about image uploads? Are those included too? Many threads are pointless without pictures. Others less so.

And then finally (maybe) how do I prevent this mechanism from being used to scrape content? We regularly thwart rogue clients that are clearly scraping the MV content, using anonymous clients (i.e. not identified as a known crawler) to request a large amount of data in a short time. Opening up a mechanism where they could download a large amount of data with a single request would basically blow a hole in the anti-scraping defenses. We could restrict use of the feature to registered users, but that's still not a very high bar, as registering an account on MV is trivial.

—

So, in summary: while this is probably technically feasible, usually when I am presented with a request that has far more questions than answers, it's hard to justify putting effort into it when there are so, so many things on the site that need improving or fixing (image upload, to name but one).

Thank you for taking the suggestion seriously, giving it thoughtful consideration, and sharing why it is not necessarily an ideal feature.

It was actually a good opportunity for me to go through the thought exercise of what would be involved. Even though the conclusion wasn't positive, it's still useful for me to go through the process of identifying the moving parts and trying to gauge how to address the various facets of the problem.

So thanks for the question, genuinely.

Shhh. Jess is learning Portuguese.
Would be embarrassing getting your homophones mixed up e.g pela donna (by the lady) vs peladona (naked).

Speaking of which, I have no idea what this statue is all about. But it doesn't seem good.

Back in the days of dialup - and meaning no offence, but this forum is like the last vestige of that time - I used Opera's offline mode to read forum threads that I had called up before. It must have used the cached data, but I don't know how it worked behind the scenes, only that it did work well.

It's half good.

Do we need age verification on MV?

Can we get an option to jump to a specific page in longer threads? I'm trolling through the retro thread and want to jump ahead a bit more than shown.

Seems reasonable.

Until that is done, I just use the address bar.
Append .18 to hop to page 18.

https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amor_de_Perdi%C3%A7%C3%A3o

I guess the ass gives it a pass? That's a nice rump.

Fascinating!

Wasn't this suggested and rejected on page 3?

There's a subtle but important difference between what you asked for and what znomit asked for. The topics in a forum are not in chronological order, while the posts in a topic are. Thus, jumping to an earlier page makes a lot more sense within a topic than it does within a forum.

And I still have the same objection -- that manual entry of a page number is tedious and error-prone. And I'm still likely to seek a different path than the obvious choice that most forums have implemented. Because I'm stubborn like that.

Finally, your suggestion wasn't rejected, it just went on to inform different features in a different way than you had suggested. Since page numbers don't really mean anything within a forum (temporally speaking, anyway) the new search function incorporates the ability to look at specific forums in specific years.

That feature came about in part because of your suggestion.

I see the difference in what was asked for now. On the face of it they look like very simlar things but as you say, topic vs whole forum works very differently with the chronological order.

For the sake of consistency, I may end up with the same solution for both cases, although I think (from memory) that there are two entirely separate pagination routines in the code. I'm thinking that the ellipsis could be made clickable, but would jump half the distance between the two pages that the ellipsis separates.

Or something like that. Maybe for especially large distances (more than 12?) it could offer additional choices about how far to jump.

Not sure yet.

The general problem with me fixing anything is that whenever I set out to do so, I find twelve other things that are either (a) more urgent, or (b) more interesting, or (c) lower-hanging fruit.

Thus, there is no intercept vector to the end of the list. The list grows faster than I can make progress on it.

Maybe I should've posted this in [NSR] What's Pissing you off Today? III instead.

Here's a better example.
I can jump directly to 8 other pages from here but nobody wants to jump to page 2 from here ever do they?
Maybe:
1 … 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 … 17

Did you get the chance/remember to investigate this one Jess?

It's on hold while I am pursuing some other very large changes to the structure of the forum. For the last 3-4 months (not counting the month I just spent in Portugal) I've been slowly putting in place some entirely new (and modern) infrastructure underneath the familiar MV facade. Ideally, nobody has noticed.

I think the change you're interested in will require a substantial re-think of the way notifications are stored and coalesced. That's going to require some careful planning, and it just hasn't happened yet.

Sorry.

It's a fair point.

feature request

search filters for threads that I've posted in and for threads or for posts that I was quoted in.

This would be in addition to some other search criteria, yes? You don't want to just see topics you've posted in, if I surmise correctly.

You can already do this when searching by post, of course, but presumably you want to see topics where a specific search term shows up and you happen to have posted? That might be fairly difficult to do within one SQL query.

Topics that you were quoted in is almost impossible. That information isn't in the search index at all (it is deliberately stripped out, in fact) and finding those posts requires a brute-force text search through the entire database.

you surmise correctly.

I kind of miss "First unread post" link in threads.

Can you not see the 'red arrow'?

Like Jim says, it's there. It's always been there.

I actually meant inside the thread itself. Sorry for the confusion.

To the best of my knowledge, that's never been a feature at MV. Do you mean you miss it compared to other forums?

I actually thought this was a feature that could be turned on in the backend of all forum software. Back when I was hosting many such features were recommended to be turned off to save resources.
It is not a necessity for me. I just suggested it because I thought it might be a nice thing to have. Some forums have it, some don't.
Let's say if you click thread that does not look familiar (due to old age memory loss). See from the first post that you have already read through it, and would like to pick up where you left off, and don't see in a quick glance if it's in page 3, 4 or 22. Or you're midway through reading 100 page thread and close the browser. Later you would like to pick up where you left off but don't remember if it was on page 40, or 60, or 53, or 42.

The base software that Modern Vespa runs was released in 2002 -- primitive times for forum software. It was missing a lot of features, and some of the features were implemented in extremely resource-intensive ways.

The site has since undergone extensive modification over the years. Most of the "modern" forum features I actually wrote myself, because there just aren't any mods available for this creaky architecture any more. Got it.

I'm stalking someone whose username briefly escaped me. Be handy to have a "next page" here.

https://modernvespa.com/members?mode=karma_best

The forum selection is busted at the bottom of the members search page too.

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